Contemporary

[ateolf]

Mary Beth wanted to watch one of two documentaries last night, one about Thelonious Monk or one about Richard Pryor, but neither ended up being available on the Criterion Channel as expected (we've had this subscription for forever, the last streaming service we belong to, and haven't really thought to make use of it in this time, so we've just been starting to lately). Instead we watched Contemporary Color, a concert documentary about David Byrne putting together this concert with a bunch of different musicians each playing a song with a color guard team doing their thing along with them. I think I hated it. It was trying way too hard to push this emotional weight that just wasn't there except in a kind of self-congratulatory way (the whole thing felt very stuck in a deep gaze up its own self). I mean, it's pretty cool that these kids got to do their thing at a big concert, but it was trying to make it to feel like some great life-changing to have them doing what they've been doing just at a large-ish one-off music show. And for the whole unique angle of this thing being the whole color guard thing, you never really get a sense of that. The directors are trying harder to force that personal sort of intimate connection with the kids (I'm trying to find a better word to use than "kids", but what do you call someone who does color guard? a color guardist? athlete? I think athlete might work...) and that kinda falls flat given there's at least like two hundred of them altogether, but there are lots of close-ups of them trying to get you to feel their emotions, but the whole point of color guard is how all of the athletes work together to create a visual whole (as seen from a distance in the football stadium bleachers) and there's very little sense of the groups working as a whole, just these stylized close-ups that are edited and super-imposed in ways that are trying to be artistic but feel hollow and try to elide the actual point with what the directors want to make the point of it. Also, I'm often one for elliptical editing in a documentary, I don't think things always have to be straightforward to be effective, but here, all the editing to cut away from the event and performances to random backstage banter and scenery felt, once again, forced. Like it's trying to create this big feeling of the event as a whole, but there's kind of "no there there." It just felt like the directors were kind of bored with the material they actually had and wanted to make it into something bigger and more epic than it was. So you get the actual thing it's supposedly about and there's just no feeling for it. Like to build off the emotions of the event, you'd have to actually have some feeling of the event to start with, not just trying to take a shortcut to "bigger" emotions. I guess that cuts to the essence of what I said about it all feeling forced. The musical performances were for the most part not my thing (they wouldn't have to be for the movie to be good, nor do I even think I'd have to be into the color guard stuff either if they'd ever actually really showed it, for the movie to be good as a movie documenting what happened...I mean, I don't have to like a subject to like what a movie can do with that subject...but as I feel the movie already failed on that level, I'll talk about the music some). Even the artists that I do like on the line-up were for the most part all at their most tepid (not worst, just most middle-of-the-road). And most of the songs (each artist was doing one song they wrote for the event with one of the color guard teams performing) tended to follow the same pattern (not all, but most did this thing where they started off soft and orchestral and then after a little bit the beat drops and then it's now a weak, mid-tempo pop song with a strong beat). I think the best song of the lot may have been David Byrne's...and it was exactly what you'd expect David Byrne in 2015 to sound like and it was pretty bland and forgettable. Oh, and the Ira Glass thing with the interviews chopped up was probably the most cloying and sappy part of the whole thing. And I guess it's not his fault, but David Byrne's "America has changed" comment trying to tie in to Obergefell did not age well at all. Did I have more to say? I guess I've blabbed about this movie way too much already.